When Chagall and Malevich Battled in Russia
At New York’s Jewish Museum, a new exhibition will focus on how an art school spurred a bitter division in the shadow of the Russian Revolution.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-chagall-and-malevich-battled-in-russia-1533828420
Marc Chagall celebrated his hometown in ‘Over Vitebsk’’ (1915-20). PHOTO: MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
To Marc Chagall, the Russian Revolution was as much an artistic movement as a political one. The Bolsheviks who took over in November 1917 appointed the young artist to run the People’s Art School in August 1918. For the next two years, Chagall—famed for his paintings of flying, joyous animals and people—participated in a highly unusual experiment in art education that turned into a bitter battle between two now world-famous artists.
Starting Sept. 14, New York’s Jewish Museum is celebrating the centenary of the unusual school’s founding with a show of about 160 works and documents. The school’s teachers—abstract pioneer Kazimir Malevich, his disciple El Lissitzky and Chagall—shared strong messages about art with their students, all while continuing to create work. “Chagall, Lissitzky, Malevich: The Russian Avant-Garde in Vitebsk, 1918-1922” includes other artists, including David Yakerson and Lazar Khidekel, students at the school.
Chagall opened the People’s Art School in his quiet hometown of Vitebsk in modern-day Belarus, about 300 miles west of Moscow. The Russian Civil War was heating up, and political turmoil would continue in the country throughout the brief life of the school. But for Jews like Chagall, a 30-year-old laborer’s son who had just returned from study in Paris, things were improving enormously. While some anti-Jewish riots still continued in Russia, Jews were able to leave their earlier confines with new protections against discrimination. The tuition-free school Chagall ran could give Jews and workers in general an opportunity to become artists.
Chagall wrote enthusiastically in his autobiography, “Throughout the town, my multicolored animals swung back and forth, swollen with revolution,” notes Angela Lampe, who curated this show and its earlier iteration at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. In Chagall’s joyful “Onward, Onward” from 1918, a painting on grid-lined paper for the first anniversary of the October Revolution, a leaping man jumps over homes, with a sign that reads, “Forward, forward, without a halt.”
Chagall’s ‘Onward, Onward’ (1918), a study for the first anniversary of the October Revolution. PHOTO: ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY
The artist’s love of his hometown is best expressed in “Over Vitebsk,” from the permanent Museum of Modern Art collection in New York, featuring what Ms. Lampe refers to as one of his trademark “flying Jews.” Both of these pictures are in the new exhibition.
El Lissitzky, ‘Proun 6,’ circa 1920 PHOTO:PUNCTUM/BERTRAM KOBER
Chagall soon recruited his first major academic counterpart at the school, El (Lazar) Lissitzsky, who had begun his career as an illustrator of Jewish children’s books. Not yet 30, Lissitzsky fervently believed in communism and art as agents for change. He championed his own school of thought, Proun (an acronym that translates out as projects for asserting/affirmation of the new), blurring the line between structural design and paintings. A work by Lissitzky titled “Proun” uses shapes and figures from cubism influences, relying heavily on abstraction.
In 1919 the third artist—who some might call the fly in the ointment—arrived. The down-on-his-luck, 40-ish Kazimir Malevich was the eldest of the trio and an artistic maverick whose “Black Square” (1915) is one of the most famous pieces of early abstract art. He, too, had a school of artistic thought: suprematism.
Kazimir Malevich, ‘Mystic Suprematism (Red Cross on Black Circle),’ 1920-22. PHOTO:COLLECTION OF STEDELIJK MUSEUM
As the Malevich paintings in the Jewish Museum exhibition reveal, suprematism is devoid of distraction, with less color than, say, Chagall’s work. Crosses in red, black and white make ample use of negative space, with bold lines and flat structures using oil on panel and canvas, and esoteric titles such as “Suprematism of the Spirit” (1919) and “Mystic Suprematism (Red Cross on Black Circle)” (1920-22). His stark black and white, two-dimensional forms are deliberately nonfunctional. Aggressive geometric abstractions drive home the purist message, bolstered by Malevich’s extensive writings. From his introduction to the school, dramatically descending the main stairwell, students flocked to him. Lissitzky urged students to print out Malevich’s writings.
Chagall was still celebrating the school’s eclectism. But the harmony was not to last. The unbending Malevich announced, “The influence of economic, political, religious, and utilitarian phenomena on art is the disease of art.”
Lissitzky left for Berlin. Malevich ran the school on his own, overseeing the graduation of 10 students in 1922. That was the only graduating class of the People’s Art School, which was also facing increasing suspicion from the Bolsheviks that the art being produced was not ideological enough.“In a few months, suprematism had overtaken the school, and totally transformed it,” said the Jewish Museum’s Morris and Eva Feld Curator, Claudia Nahson, who collaborated on this project. “Chagall’s more personal and lyrical style fell out of favor as Malevich emphasized abstraction and collective art. With attendance to his classes gradually dwindling, Chagall left Vitebsk in the spring of 1920 and moved to Moscow, where he was invited to work for the State Jewish Chamber Theater.” Embittered and weakened, Chagall was increasingly critical of Malevich’s stark imagery—a contrast to Chagall’s phantasmagoria.
Eventually, Malevich abandoned painting altogether, focusing on theoretical lectures and books, studying architecture and designing porcelain tableware. His work had fallen out of favor before his death in 1935. Lissitzky returned to Russia, dying of tuberculosis in 1941. As for Chagall, who barely escaped extermination by the Nazis, he lived to be lionized world-wide and died at age 97.
